


The Symptom of Time

by FrostbitePanda



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Don't say I didn't warn you, Dragonstone, Eventual Smut, F/M, Jonerys Week, Jonerys Week 2018, Magic, Past implied Dany/daario, Soulmark AU, Soulmarks, Soulmates, and basically extinct at this point, but beautiful, judicious use of the vignette, just wanted to participate, nonlinear timeline, oz is being written dontworry, painful, past implied jon/ygritte, slight stream of consciousness sort of things, soulmarks are weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-03-27 12:03:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13880475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda
Summary: Davos halted as Jon yanked off his glove and held out his hand for him to see. He was done with it. Done with the whole lot-- the dark secret he had carried with him like some bone-deep blight, the truth that he now knew, so bright and blazing he felt he might go mad with it.Davos was silent for a very long time, before he looked back up at him. “Is that… what I think it is?”(Soulmark AU for Jonerys week 2018. Feels ahoy.)





	1. In Our Perfect Secret-Keeping

  


When Missandei first saw it, she blinked slowly, pulling her lips over her teeth, her eyes shifting elsewhere.

 

“It’s alright,” Dany assured, looking down at her chest, brushing her fingers over the blue petals etched as fine as thread into her skin.

 

“I’ve never seen one before,” Missandei admitted quietly, a blush coloring her olive cheeks. “I thought they were long away from this world.”

 

“I did not think it to be true,” Dany murmured after a small but heavy silence. “I walked from the funeral pyre with three dragons at my breast and-- this.”

 

Missandei searched out her eyes carefully. “Do you know?” she asked, “I mean to say… do you know who the other person…?”

 

Dany shook her head, drawing in on herself suddenly, covering the mark with her palm. “I think I may never know.”

 

“Soul marks are magic, Your Grace,” she protested. “They do not appear if you are not destined to meet.”

 

Dany turned her face downwards with a frown. “I am not fashioned for such things.”

 

Her new friend looked at her sadly, shaking her head before continuing Dany’s disrobing. “And yet you have one,” she said after a moment. “The only person in the world who does, for all I know… except for one other, of course.”

 

Dany looked to her bare feet, pondering. “I cannot think myself so privileged.”

 

“I think it a blessing.”

 

Dany straightened, pulling herself from her dark reverie. “Whatever it is,” she said coldly, “it hardly matters now.”

 

+++

 

Jon looked over at his friend sharply at his gasp. “What is it?” he asked worriedly, peering down at his bandaged hand. “Has it festered?” They had no time to deal with such an ailment-- they were to leave tomorrow for Craster’s Keep

 

Sam shook his head as he cleared the last of the bandages away. Jon’s skin was still red and smarting, but was otherwise unmarred.

 

Except for a strange black filigree, threaded under his pale skin, at the saddle of the thumb.

 

“What the hells is that?” Jon asked loudly.

 

Sam shook his head again, clearly dumbfounded. “I can’t believe it… but-- Jon that’s a _soulmark_.”

 

“A _what_?” Jon had only heard tales of soulmarks in passing… girls giggling and sighing in the yard at Winterfell, wondering what their soulmark would be, if they ever were to get one.

 

It was simple fantasy, a fun game to play if you were a bored child-- no one had been painted with a soulmark in centuries. Most assumed they had always been a fiction from the start.

 

“A soulmark, Jon,” Sam repeated breathlessly, beaming in excitement. He leaned over his hand to get a better look. “I never thought I’d see one. Oh! It’s so beautiful.”

 

Jon snatched his hand away, disbelief coiling in his belly, something like dread crawling into his throat. He brought his palm up to his face, squinting in the firelight. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. “It wasn’t there a day ago.”

 

“No one really knows why marks appear when they do,” Sam explained, eager. He shifted in his seat, as if wanting to snatch up Jon’s hand again. “But this is amazing, Jon.” Sam ducked his head, trying to catch his eyes. “Don’t you think so?”

 

Jon shook his head slowly. “I am a bloody bastard, Sam,” he said. “And now a sworn brother of the Night’s Watch… what in the Seven Hells am I going to do with a bloody soulmark?”

 

Sam looked a bit defeated at this, his shoulders twitching as he swallowed. “Well, when you put it that way…”

 

“How are you so sure that this is… what you say it is?” Jon spat, mood now properly spoiled as he dropped his hand back to the table.

 

“Well, first off, I don’t think someone tattooed you in your sleep,” Sam said in jest, smiling. The grin immediately melted away as his friend realized that his attempt at levity was perhaps misjudged. He cleared his throat. “But soulmarks have a _sheen_ to them… and they are far finer and more detailed than any tattoo.”

 

Jon brought his hand closer to his face. The mark did indeed possess a luster, making the chain, the open band, gleam as good as steel and bronze right there upon his flesh. He felt his heart shudder, his skin go clammy.

 

Sam turned his head back to his palm, examining it carefully, awkward under Jon’s dark silence. “It looks like those awful collars they put on slaves in Volantis and all those slave cities.”

 

Jon blinked at his friend, feeling as though he were being continually kicked in the stomach. “So, let’s consider for a moment that what you say is actually the truth of it,”Jon said slowly, the words strange on his tongue. “The person… that I’m supposed to be… promised to… is a slave?”

 

He did not know what to think about that. The only slaves he knew of were so far away he could scarcely conceive of the distance. And if they were in bondage? Well, it seemed his mate was just as trapped as he.

 

“Well it looks as though the collar is broken,” Sam pointed out optimistically. “So... whoever it is is a _former_ slave, in the very least.” Sam shrugged. “But it could be something else entirely… soulmarks are… well, no one seems to really know how they work.”

 

“That is because they are nothing but a fairytale,” Jon growled, coming to his feet with a clatter and stomping to the washbasin on the other side of his room. He thrust his hands into the water, grabbing up the rough, ashy soap to scrub at his palm.

 

“That won’t work,” Sam called calmly from where he sat. “No matter how hard you try, it won’t go away.”

 

Jon continued, dauntless, his healing skin stinging and peeling under the gritty soap. The mark remained, untarnished and gleaming faintly under the cloudy water.

 

He slumped his shoulders, defeated. “What else do you know about soulmarks, Sam?” he asked quietly after a long bout of silence.

 

“Not much,” Sam replied as he lifted himself from his chair, clutching a roll of fresh linen. “I know that the sigils of the great houses were supposed to have been the founding members’ soulmarks, once upon a time.” Jon dried his hands and Sam wound the linen over his palm as he continued. “Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters were supposed to have had a dragon each. That’s where the three-headed dragon came from.”

 

“So… whoever my… person is,” Jon said haltingly, his heart starting to pound, as realization fully set in. “They… they have this same mark?”

 

Sam shook his head. “No, not necessarily.”

 

“Then how did people _know_?” Jon protested. “How did they know they… got the right... person?”

 

Sam shrugged. “I guess they just kind of… _know_ ,” Sam said unhelpfully as he tied off the end of the bandage. “They _are_ magic, after all. I’ve heard stories that the marks have… well they _react_  to one another.”

 

Jon didn’t know what to say to this, his mind locked and buzzing.

 

“Besides,” Sam went on with a smile. “You and your… person are the only ones who bear one, to my knowledge. Should be pretty easy to spot.”

 

Jon swore, stepping away and sitting on the edge of his bed. _Why?_ he thought to himself bitterly. Of all the people in all the bloody world…

 

“No one can know about this, Sam,” Jon said sternly, looking up at his friend with solemn eyes. “I already tried to desert once… Mormont may never let me out of his sight if he knew I had… this.” He squeezed his fingers over his wrist and hung his head.

 

“I’m sorry, Jon,” Sam finally said after a long pause. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear it.”

 

Jon managed a watery little smile. “I know you won’t, Sam.”

 

Sam walked over to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Get some rest, Jon.”

 

Jon nodded and Sam gathered up his healing kit, leaving without a word.

 

+++

 

Just as she had suspected, Daario stopped at the sight of it.

 

He leaned away from her, eyes confused. “That is not some crude tattoo,” he said wonderingly as he brushed curious fingers over it.

 

“No,” she replied coolly. “No, it is not.”

 

Daario stepped closer to her. “I can’t help but feel a bit jealous.”

 

She tilted her chin up at him, defiant. “Why?”

 

His eyes widened, bewildered. “Well, because you belong to another--”

 

“I belong to no one,” she cut across him sharply. “My body is mine to share with whom I wish.”

 

“But not your heart. Is that it?”

 

She paused, the question shaking her to her core, an echo of all the things the little mark of blue within her flesh meant. She licked her lips as she grabbed hold of him, hot and hard, stroking from root to tip. “If you aim for my heart, Daario Naharis, you best be prepared.”

 

He grinned wickedly at her, emboldened, and sealed his lips over the pulse of her throat.

 

+++

 

“What is that?”

 

They were languishing in the steaming pool, stated and blissful, when he unthinkingly brought his hand up to brush her fiery hair from her face, her cheek resting upon his shoulder.

 

He felt his blood go cold, despite the heat of the water. For at least a little while, he had forgotten the brand of strange fate seared into his skin. He stilled, looking down and swallowing. “Not sure.”

 

She sat up to look him fully in the face. “You’re not sure?” she asked, astonished. “You’re a _marked man_ , Jon Snow.”

 

He felt his heart clench up in his chest, feeling inexplicably guilty.

 

Ygritte pushed herself away from him, looking hurt and disgusted in equal measure. “You laid with me, with _that_ on your skin.”

 

“I-- Ygritte… there’s is no possible way--”

 

“Marks don’t just _appear_ , Jon Snow,” she spat, beginning to lift herself from the pool. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

 

“And what would you know about it?” he returned angrily, focusing his long-tended resentment towards the unasked-for mark elsewhere. Anger was easier. “They’ve been extinct for centuries.”

 

Her eyes flashed as she gathered up her clothes. “I am of the North, Jon Snow, they are _not_ extinct up here.” She pointed at a small scar floating above her fourth rib, vaguely the shape of a spade. “Mine died two years ago.”

 

Jon felt himself go limp, sodden with regret and casting about for something… _anything_ that would make her understand as she hurriedly wrapped herself in her furs. “I am a _bastard_ Ygritte, I’m a man of the Night’s Watch. Even if I were ever to meet this person… what could I do?”

 

Her nostrils flared, her ire rising ever higher like a greedy flame. “So you think because you can’t be with who you are fated to, _I_ will do in the meantime?”

 

“No, Ygritte, please--”

 

“Get dressed, Jon Snow,” she snarled as she pulled her hair from her coat. “It’s a long march tomorrow. Best get your rest.”

 

+++

 

_The pale creature stood before her, eyes red as roe, baleful and knowing. She felt no fear, though the beast loped toward her on silent paws over the mossy floor, the maze of gnarled tree roots._

 

_It stared her down, only one, swift step from her. The light in its eyes grew cold and distant as a star, hung with the making of the world._

 

_“Who are you?” she asked the beast. But the beast did not answer. It fell upon the earth, blood dripping from its gaping mouth, fading away into mist and shadow._

 

She cried out, clutching her chest, writhing in the ash of Drogon’s nest. A flash of heat, a lip of fire burning over her skin and then it was gone.

 

She lay heaving and sweaty under the spill of moon, the stars blurring under the burn of tears. She sat up, scrabbling numb fingers over the collar of her tattered and stained dress. And there it was, a flower-- now puckered and pink and ugly, no longer beautiful, no longer blue as a glacier.

 

A wordless roar of rage tore through her as she clawed at her dress-- the fabric now itchy and hot. Great, wracking sobs seized her as she cried out her grief into the empty moors. A lonely wolf answered her call.

 

She laid herself upon the cold grass, mourning the love she had denied herself all her life. Mourning the mark she had detested and cherished all at once. Mourning the mate she would never know.

 

+++

 

He hadn’t thought about it in years.

 

It was something unwanted and unnoticed-- like the scar over his eye, the ugly and red ridges in his chest. Whenever he _did_ catch himself looking at it he would shake himself, pull his gloves back on hastily. He had other things to concern himself with, other things to do.

 

“Breaker of chains,” Missandei of Naath had said within the gloomy glow of the throne room. He almost missed it, having grown restless and weary of her endless titles almost immediately.

 

And now he sat in the solar of his dreary rooms in an unfamiliar castle, running a thumb over the mark that he had not properly looked at in an age.

 

It had not faded, the lines standing out as pristine and sharp as glass. The collar stood open and gaping, a length of chain flowing from the end of it snapped in two as if struck with a hammer. Tiny pieces of it littered the lines of his skin like freckles.

 

He recalled his dream, ages ago now, cold and lonely in his measly bed at Castle Black. Walking through a flame-rimmed hell, smoke curling in his nose, brimstone bubbling in his blood. Harpies cawed and clawed around a lone, naked figure of a woman, snapping their talons into her, relentless and hellish. In the end, it wasn’t the flames that had killed her.

 

_“The Unburnt.”_

 

He released a great and exhausted breath, leaning his elbows onto his thighs and placing his face in his hands. How big of fool was he to think that _she_ bore _his_ mark upon her skin? That whatever queer magic that had burrowed itself within his palm was meant for _her_? Him, the bastard of Winterfell, marked with the mother of dragon’s brand?

 

 _A northern fool_ , he thought. That was all he’d ever be.

 

+++

 

“What do you think Ser Davos meant?” Dany asked her friend from over her shoulder as she shrugged out of her robe. “About Jon Snow?”

 

Missy came around to stand in front of her carrying a tray laden with vials and sponges. She frowned at her. “What do you mean, Your Grace?”

 

“He said that Jon Snow took a knife in the heart for his people,” she answered as she stepped into the tub. “A queer thing to say, don’t you think?”

 

Missandei placed the tray down on the little table next to the bath. “I assumed that it was a figure of speech.”

 

Thoughtlessly, Dany brushed wet fingers over her chest, feeling the smooth skin where a scar once blossomed. _Yes,_ she thought, _nothing more than fancy talk._

 

Missandei did not know of the scarring, which had only lasted a matter of days. Dany had hoarded that awful night away like the reviled nightmare it was.

 

As she marched with the khalasar, whipped and chained, she could not think on it much, the mark that had drawn itself back within her like a silent ghost within the night. She could not ponder how a mark could scar-- a permanent erasure of the mate it belonged to-- and then reappear as if nothing had happened at all.

 

She had started to think she had dreamed it all-- a spell sparked from her slow starvation within the empty wild.

 

Missandei watched her with questioning eyes and Dany looked away, hand dropping to the water with a splash. “Your Grace? Do you think....? Do you think this Jon Snow? That… he is…?”

 

She remembered the way her skin flushed when Jon Snow’s Hand had let this detail slip, seemingly against the so-called King in the North’s wishes. A foolish, heady, _impossible_ hope had gripped her like a current, threatening to carry her away.

 

“No,” she said tonelessly, eyes far away. “No, I think not.”

 

+++

 

He did not know what had happened in that cave.

 

He had been forced closer to her than he had ever dared, simply out of lack of space, the general claustrophobic nature of caves and their many secret chambers. It did not matter that the mark under his glove had simmered like a caldera when she had stepped closer to him, eyes lit with promise and danger all at once.

 

And it certainly did not matter that he felt as though he had been seared with a red-hot poker, fresh from an angry forge, when he circled his fingers over her elbow to lead her where he wished. He had bit his lip, keeping his yelp of pain and surprise safely within his throat.

 

He knew he could not fool her. She peered at him sharply, question burning in her pale eyes. If she had asked, he did not know if he could have denied her.

 

But she simply turned away from him, marching alongside him as they stepped from the gloom of the caves into the bright, gray light of the beach.

 

+++

 

He seemed to have been waiting for her, cloak billowing like a sail from his shoulders in the harsh bluster of the clifftop.

 

She didn’t know what to think-- didn’t know how he knew where and when to find her. She pressed her fingers to her chest, hesitating, before closing her eyes and telling Drogon to land.

 

She was shocked when Jon only flinched once as Drogon thundered toward him, her son rankled by the man’s closeness, the solitude of the clifftop.

 

She watched as he tugged off his glove, as he inched closer, as he placed a steady palm onto Drogon’s thorny hide.

 

Something queer and reckless pooled behind her hammering heart as she hastily slid from Drogon’s shoulders. “What was that?”

 

He seemed perturbed as he swiftly and somewhat clumsily pulled his glove back on. “I’m sorry, Your Grace,” he muttered in apology. “I thought it would be… they’re beautiful creatures--”

 

“What was that _on your hand_?” she cut across him, clarifying.

 

He blinked at her, white skin somehow growing paler in the new sun of the morning. He looked down at his gloves, his protracted silence already telling her more than whatever excuse he was now conjuring up in his head would. “A scar, Your Grace,” he finally said, as lightly as he could as he shook his head. “Burned my hand a few years ago.”

 

She moved to catch his eyes. The brand on her chest was burning icy cold, her mind now made up. She was already half in love with him anyway. What did it matter? “I don’t think scars are often black, my lord.”

 

He looked at her, frozen, eyes so large and dark she thought she may be swallowed up. “Men of the Night’s Watch often get tattoos, Your Grace.”

 

“I thought you said it was a scar?” He swallowed, ashen, as if he were suddenly facing a starving, slavering panther. He looked to his boots, suitably chided.

 

She stepped closer to him, taking his hand in her own, as calm as a millpond. “I’d like to see it.” She plucked at the fingers of his glove, and he seemed not able to move at all, paralyzed, his chest starting to heave. “I’ve always been fascinated by tattoos.”

 

He finally seemed to regain himself, closing his fingers over her own as the glove started to inch down his palm. “Your Grace,” he said, voice like a rockslide.

 

She looked up at him, but his eyes did not reflect his protests. They told a different tale-- of some desperate, foolish hope that he had tried to starve away within his noble heart. She yanked the glove away with a final pull, before looking down.

 

She brushed her thumb over the mark, the lines raised and heated like wire, hot like an unsealed and rotted wound . She stared for a very long time, not truly believing what she was seeing.

 

A ragged sob escaped her and she pressed her hand to her mouth. She stepped away, shaking her head as she tried with little avail to quell her quaking, the tears that fought their way down her face.

 

“Your Grace?” Jon asked, worry shading every line in his face as he took a careful step towards her, hands outstretched but lost, not knowing where to land.

 

“How long have you known?” she asked, gasping through the storm in her chest.

 

He looked at her, eyes slanting with sadness. He finally looked away. “I suspected almost the moment I met you, Your Grace. I did not… I did not think it true until this very moment.”

 

She stepped forward at the same time he did and she was caught up in his arms, crushed to him. The icy ache of the mark on her chest unspooled, falling away to a sweet throb as she pressed her face into his neck, taking in the frantic beat of his pulse, the scent of the Myrish soap they had brought from Mereen. The weight of the relief was almost agonizing, her skin feeling taut and fragile-- as though she could barely hold it all in. “I thought I’d never find you,” she mumbled into the shell of his ear.

 

“Aye,” he croaked against her hair. He seemed to want to say more, but the words got stuck-- tangled up in the madness of his breath, the tremble of his limbs.

 

They could have stood there, knotted up together like vines, until the sea ate away at the cliff beneath their very feet. But she was a queen, and he, a king, and respite never came easily to kings and queens.

 

The jangle of sword belts and the stomp of many feet broke the spell and she leaned away from the cold leather of his hauberk reluctantly. Her bloodriders were escorting the long-lost Ser Jorah Mormont, who stood wind-stung and discomfited some paces from her, stunned and embarrassed to see her in such an embrace.

 

She felt herself unable to feel any sort of shame. She had finally done the impossible, and she would not let propriety spoil her joy.

 

She glanced over her shoulder at Jon as she stepped forward to greet her friend. He looked dazed, ready to fall to the grass and lay there for an age, his eyes helpless and thirsty for her. She tilted her chin just slightly.

 

 _Later_.

 

+++

 

He didn’t know what to do.

 

He knew what he _should_ do. He should request his ship, his sword, sail to White Harbor at first light, ignore the sullen ache in his hand and pretend this didn’t happen. Pretend that the mark etched in his very blood didn’t belong to a woman who held magic in her breath, emptied a sea across the world, birthed demons and demigods alike, who had walked through fires and trod upon the broken backs of evil men to get here.

 

The good thing was, he couldn’t think on it much.

 

But, _dark wings, dark words_ , as his father always said.

 

“Your Grace, you cannot leave so soon,” his advisor said, standing worriedly before him with his hands folded behind his back.

 

“I must, Davos,” Jon responded tiredly as he flexed his right hand, the ache in his bones having not faded in the least. He threw the scroll on the cluttered desk, ire rising. “What else am I supposed to do?”

 

“Not return home empty handed, Your Grace,” Davos returned hotly. “Tuck tail and run with nothing to aid you in this fight.”

 

“Aye, we don’t have the men, the dragonglass, or three bloody dragons, but what else am I to do?” The wick on his temper had long since been cut short. The day’s revelations, both dark and sweet, were grinding on his raw nerves as good as a whetstone. He felt a flash of heat whip through his palm again and he winced, pulling his hand to his chest.

 

Davos stepped toward him, brow crinkled in worry. “Your Grace? What’s wrong? Have you injured yourself?”

 

Jon threw a fist down on the table, cursing. “Why should it be me?” he muttered darkly as he leaned his knuckles on the desk, hanging his head.

 

“I’m… I’m sorry, Your Grace, that all this fell business should be heaped at your feet,” Davos said sympathetically. He shifted upon his feet. “But, it seems to me the best leaders are made of those who would rather forgo--”

 

Davos halted as Jon yanked off his glove and held out his hand for him to see. He was done with it. Done with the whole lot-- the dark secret he had carried with him like some bone-deep blight, the truth that he now knew, so bright and blazing he felt he might go mad with it.

 

Davos was silent for a very long time, before he looked back up at him. “Is that… what I think it is?”

 

Jon nodded grimly. The mark was raised and red around the edges as he pulled his glove back on and strode around his advisor. “If I don’t leave…” he trailed off, shaking his head as he looked to the fire.

 

Holding her on that windy slope of stone and moss had felt like slipping into some ancient forest-- a place of their own making, a place that could never be put back again. The map to it was seared into his very skin. He could never forget it. But it was a burden he had never asked to bear, a key he had never asked to hold.

 

He only knew that if he stepped there again, he would not come back.

 

“Your Grace,” Davos began softly, “If we must leave, this is not the reason.”

 

“I cannot stay here. It is not the time for this.”

 

Davos snorted. “You don’t have much choice in that matter, I’m afraid, Your Grace.” Davos walked toward him slowly, something like a fond smile on his face. “Soulmarks are a brand of fate, after all.”

 

Jon gritted his teeth. “Aye, so I’ve heard.” He strode to the door, steps long and assured, ready to be done with it. “We can’t speak of this any longer, we are already late.”

 

Davos bowed, reluctant but defeated, and strode out through the door to begin the long journey to the War Room.

 

+++

 

“They won’t have to.”

 

The words dug into her like barbs, slicing to the quick. She felt her fingers dig into the arm of her chair as she dared look over at him.

 

Tyrion’s plan was fragile at best, disastrous at worst. But any protests she may have had died in her throat in the light of no other alternative. Now, with him standing at the end of the room, looking triumphant and tragic in equal measure, she felt a blast of wind breathe itself into the bed of coals within her heart.

 

He _wanted_ to leave her, jumped upon the opportunity like a hungry jackal spotting a field mouse.

 

She grappled within the sudden blankness of her mind, nowhere to grab hold, not knowing how to properly shoulder this betrayal. Her mark tingled under her bodice as if it were etching itself in a fine frost and she swallowed to distract herself. She wanted to say something, to pound her fists upon the table, to rage and roar like like the dragon she was.

 

But she could see the dark resolution in his tar-black eyes, could see his shoulders tense, readying for the fight.

 

The silence grew oppressive and he shifted under its weight. Something in his eyes flickered, the anticipation of an argument leeching away under the intensity of the silence. He looked down. “I am sorry, Your Grace,” he said in a tone not meant for so many ears, “but this is the only way.”

 

Her eyes flicked to Tyrion. “Leave us,” she said, voice filled with all the confidence she did not feel.

 

There were some quickly dismissed protestations before the crowd filtered out of the room, uneasy and muttering.

 

He stood before her, stiff and twitchy, fighting with his every fiber to stay in that room, to not look at her lest she burn him up with a single glance.

 

“Is this your plan, my lord?” she asked, shockingly level considering the tumult turning within her.

 

“Is there another?” he asked darkly.

 

She found herself incensed, angry that he should be so cavalier, so flippant about his own life.

 

“So you wish to go on this hero’s mission? To perhaps get yourself killed before this war is even started, my lord?” She tried to keep her voice level, to sound nonchalant, merely curious, but by the deepening lines around his eyes, she could tell there was no fooling him.

 

Jon looked at her, finally, face impassable but eyes lit by something bright and vital and dangerous. Something that she thought she should be running away from, instead of falling into, like she might be doing now. “What kind of king am I if I will not fight for them?”

 

She stood from her chair. She knew he aimed to throw her off kilter, shake her to her core with her own words flung back at her, but she found herself steady as rock within a riverbed. She picked up a dragon figure from the table and palmed it. “You wish to be away from me so soon?”

 

“No.”

 

She looked up at him and his face was wretched, his fists clenched at his sides. The word had sounded like it had been torn away, ripped out of his mouth like a bitter weed. She placed the figure down and stepped closer.

 

“No,” he repeated again, voice starting to warp and crack under the weight of his struggle. “No, I do not.”

 

She stood, silent and patient in front of him. Her mark ached and sweat started to bloom and pool on her collarbone.  

 

He took a mighty breath, looking to the floor. “But I cannot stay. I have a duty to my people. To the north.”

 

She took another step forward, her resolve straining mightily. “That is not the only reason.”

 

“Aye, it’s not,” he said, eyes brimming and burning in the blue glow of the hidden sun.

 

She was finally level with him, chin tilted up, meeting his depthless gaze with shocking courage. “I am afraid too, Jon.”

 

The sound of his name leaving her mouth, unfettered and simple, seemed to strike him like a blow. She felt his mark upon her chest clench, ice seeping into her marrow.

 

She ventured careful fingers over the gloved palm of his right hand. Heat simmered underneath like a banked fire. He was shaking, rooted to the earth, breath coming out of him in short, steady bursts. She gathered up his hot hand into both her own and lifted it, meaning to place it upon the curve of her clavicle, to warm the chill that resided there.

 

He snatched his hand away. “ _Daenerys_ ,” he panted. His brow was shiny with sweat.

 

“I’m not here to trap you,” she said quietly, searching his face. The lines in his neck stood out like tow ropes. He was dangling at the bitter end of his strength.

 

“I _want_ you to trap me,” he nearly gasped. He looked to the floor as if in shame, the silence a living, cumbersome thing that almost suffocated her. “Your Grace, all my life I was made to believe I would belong to no one, that no one would have me. And for years, I lived under and oath I swore before my father’s gods that would ensure just that.” His fists clenched at his sides. “I dared not think it true when I was first painted with it and I can scarcely think it true now, even with your fire burning in my blood.”

 

He stepped closer to her, face like a thunderhead. She wanted nothing more than to lean into him, to gather his heat and his scent under her hands, but he was being maddening-- drawing away and swinging closer to her gravity in equal measure, orbiting her like a comet. She was trying her best to be patient, but it was becoming unbearable. “And now…” he halted again, his strength faltering. He indicated her with helpless, open palms. “And now… now it’s _you_ and the very end of days is at our feet.”

 

She swallowed, his words eroding her resolve like the ancient lick of the tide. “I meant everything I said in that throne room, Jon Snow,” she began, her voice still somehow deep and level. “I have been chained and betrayed, raped and defiled. After Drogo, I was certain that I was simply unfit for... “ She swallowed back the word _love_ like the nasty secret it was. “I never dared hope to find you, yet here we are.” She looked away, no longer trusting that her eyes didn’t give her all away. “And now you wish to push it away and ignore it like a sore thumb? To what end?” He did not answer, staring at her with an expression she did not know quite what to do with. “Do you think my mark chose you by mistake?”

 

“Gods, I hope not,” he breathed, voice dark and husky and slipping into her like a drug, pooling hot and heavy in her belly. “But if I walk there with you now, our paths would be forever merged and I cannot take that path now, Daenerys. I must take my own— at least until this fell deed is done. If I walk there with you now, I may not survive it.”

 

Her mark throbbed beneath her skin like a tumor, malignant and lethal. _“Soulmarks are a queer magic, Khaleesi.”_ She remembered Missandei saying to her one idle evening. _“They respond to one another once the the chosen two touch, they say. And from then until the end of days they will forever be alive with the spirit of the other person.”_

 

She felt a thread of sweat form down her temple, curve over the line of her clenching jaw. She swallowed, but the enormity of the weight in her chest got it stuck and she coughed. “You are fool, Jon Snow,” she finally managed. Miraculously, he smiled at her, amused and knowing and she found herself returning it, tears pricking at her eyes. “But I cannot help but admire your dedication to your people. Despite you being a maddening, defiant thorn in my side, it has proven to be one of the many things about you I have come to admire.”

 

He stood only a step from her, the levity of the moment almost bringing his guard down as he seemed to prepare himself to stride forward, to curl around her like a fern. And oh, how she wanted that-- but he caught himself, shaking his head as if lost in a fog. “Someday,” he began, voice slow and dark as pitch, “I shall like to tell you of all the ways I admire you, Your Grace.”

 

She looked down, sapped of all remaining strength. She was spinning in a current and she had to either give herself up to the sea, or reach for the last chance of rescue she had. She dared look up at him again, feeling small, shrunken, rung out like a rag. “Good night, Jon Snow.”

 

+++

 

The dawn rolled in cold, the wind colder. The endless tundra of the sky curved over him, grim and grey as his mood.

 

It was as a good of a setting as any, considering. His mind swirled with fear, with frustration, his eyes sagging with a sullen ache of exhaustion. He had rolled and thrashed in his bed the night before, soaked with sweat, plagued with the visions of milky skin under his teeth, chords of silver braids twisted over his fingers. Taking himself in hand had done little to assuage his agony, and he had risen hours before dawn, wandering the castle like a wraith, desperate for distraction.

 

The storm in his chest only kicked up ten fold upon seeing her cross the beach, distracting him from overseeing the loading of his ship.

 

“Lord Snow,” Tyrion greeted tightly as he stepped closer.

 

Jon ignored him and strode toward her, standing like a stone in the surf. “Thank you, Your Grace,” he said with a nod, his heart kicking against his ribs. “For everything you've done for us.”

 

She only flicked her eyes to him, cold and shuttered and he flexed his hand as his mark twitched. She was silent for such a long moment, Jon began to think that she intended to ignore him. He wondered why she bothered to see him off at all as he stepped away.

 

“I did next to nothing,” she finally said, voice leaden.

 

He turned back to her, dazed and enthralled, the expression inhabiting her face striking all the wind from his lungs. She strode forward and Jon had to resist the urge to back away. She seemed some divine creation of death and ruin, come to tear the world asunder if he did not return to her.

 

She halted, too close, too warm, in front of him. “Your sword,” she said, looking down at it. “It will kill these undead?”

 

He could only nod, his voice snatched away by the storm she was stirring up in his chest. She looked up at him then, eyes dark and bright at once-- like wood polished to a black luster by a hot fire. “We will see each other again, Lord Snow.” Her jaws were clenched, her lips tight with furious determination. “I swear it.”

 

He was left dizzy and bereft by how much he wanted to kiss her then, the ache in his heart unbearable, the only antidote living within her mouth, but she turned away, quickly, almost fleeing.

 

His hand twinged so hard he almost cried out, and he could have sworn he saw her biting her lip as she stood beside her Hand, his mark upon her answering his pain.

 

He cursed bitterly and turned away, tears standing in his eyes as he helped his men hove the boat into the sea.

 

+++

 

 _The moment of your greatest joy sustains:_  
_Not axe nor hammer,_  
_Tumor, tremor,_  
_Can take it away, and it remains._ _  
_ It remains.

 

 _\--_ “Time, As A Symptom” Joanna Newsom

  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  



	2. Dance In the Dust of Me and You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He had often been lauded, even criticized for his courage, for his foolhardy bravery. But he had been nothing but a bloody coward when faced with her-- brilliant and pale and beautiful within the gloom of the cabin. He had been so unwilling to shoulder the weight of a world that held her in it that he had fled to a wasteland realm and she had come to pluck him from amid the rubble at a terrible price. He always knew she was braver than him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge thanks for ashleyfanfic for looking this over for me and the rest of the Tarts for keeping me going. y'all are amazing.

**CHAPTER TWO: Dance in the Dust of Me and You**

  
  


_ “Do you believe in fate?” _

 

_ He seemed shocked at this question, muscles tensing underneath her hands. She could see his dark eyes glinting in the lowlight, roving the beams of the ceiling for an answer. “I didn’t.”  _

 

_ “You mean to say that you do now?”  _

 

_ “Hard not to,” he murmured, fingers squeezing the cap of her shoulder. It was a simple gesture, but packed with meaning. A meaning she did not miss.  _

 

+++ 

 

She could not get warm.

 

She was not accustomed to such frigid climes, it was true, the weather gone gray and cold even on the island of her birth. But she had the dragon in her blood, and the fire within it could scarcely be banished by a frail seawind. 

 

But her mark plagued her as good as a pox, a persistent and needling chill leaking into her bones like silt settling on a riverbed. She paced in a silent, idle torment through the halls of the castle, cursing the maker of her misery again and again as she shrugged her cloak closer, ran numb fingers under the pits of her arms, cursed the brand upon her chest that she did not ask for, the raven she had sent inviting him into her hall, the world for being fashioned as it was. 

 

The days stretched into a formless blank morass of barely tasted food and restless nights filled with visions of swirling snow and icy mountain tops. She found that her only refuge was the bathhouse adjacent to her rooms. The chamber had been nearly unsalvageable by the time they had found it, the stuffy and acerbic Stannis Baratheon being no lover of such comforts.

 

The only balm to the winter storm under her skin seemed to be beneath the scalding water. Even her clever, knowing fingers bringing her apart under the surface seemed to do little to quiet the ache in her blood. 

 

Tyrion circled her like a hesitant moth, not knowing how to tread her dark mood. She felt sorry for him, in a way. He did not know what haunted her every hour, did not know her reasons for biting her lip and bracing herself on the mantle when he had suggested that the King in the North might be in love with her. 

 

She wanted to tell her Hand, to let this weighty, dark secret spill out of her, to ask him what she should do, but all words to form such an admission were unknown to her, so she fretted and paced and worried into the small hours of the night. 

 

Missandei, however, watched her with shrewd, concerned eyes, not to be evaded so easily. 

 

“You are not well, Your Grace,” she said to her one evening, three days after Jon Snow’s departure. 

 

“I think I’ve caught a cold,” Dany responded, after too long a pause. “I am unused to these foul winds.” 

 

“Forgive me, Your Grace,” her friend began slowly as she lowered herself into the chair beside her before the fire. Dany had pulled her own closer to the hearth, not unobserved. “But I am having that queer feeling when you are not being entirely truthful with me.” 

 

Dany looked to the ground, palming her wine as she pulled her lips over her teeth. She inched her fingers up her chest, twitching at the collar of her thick wool robe. The mark beneath had been her heavy talisman to bear, a secret so long hoarded she simply did not possess the wherewithal to open it to scrutiny. The woman who sat across from her knew of it, but even then, it was a shallow and superficial familiarity. 

 

Finally, she tugged at the fabric, the fastenings of the neckline, dropping it over her right shoulder to expose her collar bone. 

 

Missandei gasped, leaning closer from her chair. “Your Grace…” 

 

Dany had been taking her baths in private, unwilling for even her most trusted friend to witness the mutation her mark had undergone. The mark itself was smooth as glass, cold as frost, but the petals were withered and warped, the pale blue deepening, the color of frostbite. 

 

Missandei shook her head as Dany rucked her collar back up, pulling it against her throat and shivering. “I do not understand, Your Grace. What does it mean?”

 

“I hardly know,” she answered shakily, taking a steadying sip of her wine. “Only that the blight upon it seems to match the same within my heart.” 

 

Missandei’s eyes widened, a sudden and profound understanding dawning upon her. “The Lord Snow,” she said softly. “It  _ is _ him.”

 

Dany found her voice locked up, trapped behind a weight in her chest so immense she resisted the urge to thrash against it with tooth and nail. 

 

Missandei blinked, brow creased and concerned as she sat in silence for a time. She turned her face back toward the fire. “In Naath, my mother used to tell me that  _ her _ mother had a soulmark.” Her eyes turned back to Dany, black and depthless within the liquid shimmer of the fire. “I used to think that it was just a simple tale she wove to soothe me to sleep at night.” 

 

Dany watched as her friend’s face tightened and looked down at the floor, caught up in painful contemplation. “Almost every night… she would tell me ‘Missandei, my flower, you will also bear a soulmark one day. But you must know this. You must remember-- soulmarks are only the echo of the heart. They do not dictate, only guide.’” 

 

Missandei heaved a great sigh, looking away, blinking rapidly and Dany reached out to grab up her hand, feeling lighter than she had since Jon Snow had turned away in the surf. 

 

“She also said,” Missandei continued, swiping at her eyes hastily with the heel of her free hand. “That soulmarks would no longer be a myth in the world. That... one day things would be good and green again, and every last one of us would be painted with the magic of another.” 

 

Dany felt something within in her crack-- a faulty wall, leaking and eroding away for an age, finally failing. She breathed in sharply, tears standing in her eyes as she squeezed her friend’s hand. 

 

“Though it is a tiresome thing, my friend,” Dany declared through faltering lungs, “you shall know it, one day. You and every last person under my care will know it and you will see the world your mother sang to you about. I swear it, my friend.” 

 

Missandei smiled at her, lips wavering and weak, her eyes bright and adoring. She placed a palm over Dany’s own and bent her head, hiding away the frail hope and burning love in her face, for now.

 

+++ 

 

_ He knew he made it too obvious. His hand gravitated to the small of her back as they walked. Never quite touching, as if that would be their saving grace.  _

 

_ At any and all gatherings, they paired off like secret-keeping children, conspiring in a grand scheme that only they knew of. They were outriders, strangers in a strange land, in a world fashioned poorly for them, one that they wished to alter like mad haberdashers. Something bigger and brighter for their grand yearnings and grand hearts and their knock-kneed, wild-eyed children.  _

 

_ They were both fighters. They were good at fighting. At fighting usurper queens and revenants, iron-clad men with coins in their purses, silk-laden lords with ambition in their eyes. They fought against the yoke of convention, the shackles of blood and name. They fought their advisors, their hearts and souls, each other.  _

 

_ They fought for a world that would never come to love them, but they did it for each other.  _

 

+++

 

The men thought he might have a fever. 

 

He sweated clean through his furs during the fits of sleep he managed to capture along the trek. His face remained flushed and dewed throughout the days of marching. 

 

“How can you be bloody sweating?” Gendry had inquired. “I wish I knew your secret, I’m freezing my bloody cock off.”

 

Tormund had asked him if he had eaten bad meat. When Jon had shaken his head in dissent, Tormund had leaned in and asked him not-so-candidly how long it had been since he had ‘let one go’, in a manner of speaking. 

 

“Last night,” Jon had responded with a smirk. “And I thought about you and that beautiful face of yours when I did it.” Everyone had howled as Tormund blushed.

 

Soon enough, it all became a grand old joke, which Jon was was both well-used to and also well relieved by. The only one who seemed skeptical was Beric Dondarrion, who roved a beady eye over him as if he knew his secret. 

 

Every long hour since he had stepped from that shore was woven into his skin as good as the seams of his furs. Night after night, after the world was reduced to nothing but the halo of a sedge fire, he would peel his dampened glove off, run his thumb over the raised and ugly ridges buried in his palm. 

 

The swelter nestled under his bones seemed some restive wraith-- as if he had been reserving a space for it within him forever. It dug and needled and burned cruelly, resentful that it should be ignored. 

 

And now, perched on a scrap of stone at the edge of the world with the dead closing in fast, he felt like the biggest fool in all the world. 

 

He understood now, when all seemed lost, when the mightiest gift he had ever been given was slipping through his fingers like sand. 

 

He loved her. He always had. 

 

+++ 

 

_ They made themselves stronger, like a bellows to a flame, a whetstone to a blade. But whetstones could be lost, swords grown dull and useless with time. Bellows destroyed and fires burnt to embers.  _

 

_ This thought both plagued and comforted her as her thumb wandered over a red ridge hewn in his chest. The mark of a dead man, the brand of a fate inescapable to any and all-- king or peasant, noble or lowly. _

 

_ But something had brought him back, had reversed the river of death to return him to this mortal realm. A world rimmed in fire and steeped in blood. A world where she resided and nothing more and that seemed enough for him. _

 

_ It was haughty,  _ naive _ to think that some lord of flame she did not believe in should deliver Jon Snow from such unbreakable bondage for her. She had begged for a lover’s life once, to whichever god would listen, and had only received more death and grief in return.  _

 

_ What a cruel god, to tinker with his subjects so. What torments to endure for such blessings to treasure. Her life and his and many others’ besides, turning upon a wheel of tragedy and triumph— Jon’s life returned though it should never have been taken, her husband murdered before his time though she should never have been sold.  _

 

+++

 

“It’s time, Your Grace,” Jorah said solemnly from behind her, shifting forward to perhaps take her arm, to drag her away from her lonely vigil. 

 

“It isn’t,” she returned sharply, pressing worried fingers to her aching chest. She knew all too well what death felt like. Had known it intimately-- the painful threads of it having sewn themselves into her skin. 

 

After delivering her precious cargo, she had shut herself in her room on the ship, scrabbling at the collar of her dress, yanking the front of it open with wind-numb fingers. The mark was there, petals wilted and withered and ugly, but very much  _ there _ . 

 

She had wept so fiercely she thought her heart would surrender, would fail and falter against the force of a relief so thorough she shook with it. Would up and melt away against the the blaze of her anger and her grief. 

 

She looked to Drogon and Rhaegal, shifting through the clouds above her, calling out their own sort of requiem. She remembered how quickly her sons had answered her on that windswept cliff, after she had awoken in her twisted sheets, drenched in sweat and shivering like a sapling, clutching her chest and gasping as good as a landed trout. Tyrion had chased after her, nearly sprinting on his shortened legs, calling out exclamations of confusion and protest that she swatted away-- perhaps to her peril.

 

Her sons had answered, and had paid dearly for it. 

 

Jorah drew level with her, eyes slanted with worry. “You seem rather certain that Jon Snow somehow escaped,” he said carefully. “He is as mighty with a blade as any I have ever seen, Your Grace, but he is not a god.”

 

“Quiet, my lord,” she snapped. A horn sounded, lonesome and dreary as a tired horse with a slumped rider trotted from the line of the distant forest. 

 

She nearly fell to her knees. The proof of his survival was emblazoned over her very heart, but as the hours had crawled by she could not help but doubt, if only a little. That small dose had proven enough to mingle in her blood like a poison. 

 

She turned back to the lift, hands shaking, mind swirling in a heady mix of fear and other, more ponderous things she could not think of now. 

 

+++

 

_ She remembered the first time she saw the collars. _

 

_ She had known of slavery, of course. Had heard of it spoken as some abstract blight that had long been scrubbed from the world. Or atleast the world that mattered. Her brother mentioned it blithely, unconcerned, and so she was unconcerned.  _

 

_ Then she was sold herself, to a Khal who only knew the barter of flesh of blood. She grew to know collars and chains intimately then.  _

 

_ And then she walked over the crumbly ruins of a funeral pyre. The pyre of her husband, slain from a wound he sustained in a fight. A fight that had been sparked from a bloodrider’s rage-- that he would not be gifted with the slaves he thought of as rightfully his.  _

 

_ And she had trod from those ashes with dragons at her breasts and struck every collar and chain she found in her path. She collected them like a pirate hoards gold and silks. She turned broken links within her palms like talismans, before discarding them in the sand, to be engulfed forever by the tide of time. _

 

_ There were no chains here, in this strange country, but the stench of bondage still clung to the foul winds.  _

 

_ It wasn’t just her past written upon his palm. They had work to do yet.  _

 

+++

 

He became aware of many things at once. 

 

The slosh of water upon a wooden belly, the gentle sway of wind and the creak of rope and timber. He was on a ship, then. He darted his dry tongue out to lick his chapped lips, flexed his fingers, the mark upon his right hand sending a bolt of heat up his arm. He cracked his heavy lids open, the light almost blinding to his ill-adapted eyes, dim and diffuse as it was.

 

A blur of white and gray sat near him and he blinked, ridding his eyes of the cloudiness that plagued them with a groan. His limbs were stiff as boards, his throat as scratchy as a nest of brambles. His head pounded dully, the harbinger of a monstrous headache to come.

 

She was looking at him, straight backed and silent, but her eyes, the twist of grief hidden within the lines of her mouth, told him everything he needed to know. 

 

“I’m sorry,” he croaked, feeling it in his aching bones. “I’m so sorry.”

 

She shook her head, looking down at her hands, as if she could play it off. 

 

He had often been lauded, even criticized for his courage, for his foolhardy bravery. But he had been nothing but a bloody coward when faced with her-- brilliant and pale and beautiful within the gloom of the cabin. He had been so unwilling to shoulder the weight of a world that held her in it that he had fled to a wasteland realm and she had come to pluck him from amid the rubble at a terrible price. He always knew she was braver than him. 

 

But he could escape behind the weak veils of duty and honor no longer-- he could feel his muscles strengthening, tensing and transmuting to cold-rolled steel as he felt that mighty burden heft itself upon him.

 

And so he snatched her up, blind and reckless with it-- with all he felt. She fell into him like a broken timber, a strangled breath caught in her mouth. 

 

His arms were still shaky and sore with cold and exhaustion, but the fire that she was stoking under his skin seemed to burn it all away. He spread his palms over her spine, pulling her from her chair so that he may cover himself with her and never emerge again.

 

She was draped over him, boneless and defeated, his bare skin to her stiff cotton. She notched her chin fast into the angle of his shoulder, as she simply breathed-- warm and real over his jugular. The agony within him dissolved. He hooked his fingers over her shoulder, pressing her closer, ever closer, not sure where to go from here, but knowing they would never be near enough.

 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice as ragged as old sailcloth. She leaned away, eyes searching his face. She was silent for a long while as she dragged moth-light fingers over the ridge carved above his heart. “I’ve been a fool.”

 

He caught up her restless hand. “Aye,” he croaked. “We both have.” He brushed a stray hair behind her ear, marvelling and breathless. “None moreso than me.”

 

She shook her head. “You were right from the beginning,” she choked out. “You were right from the beginning and--”

 

He stopped her with a thumb to her lips. “Don’t.”

 

She shook her head as she caught her lip between her teeth, eyes welling and spilling over with tears. 

 

He hated it, hated all of it. The nature in which they were brought together, the end of all days laid at their feet, the cruelties they both had to endure to get here-- in a dim cabin on a bobbing boat sailing through a frozen sea.

 

She leaned further away, swiping at her eyes and sniffing. The absence of her warmth was almost painful. She gathered herself straighter, folding her hands in her lap. “We stay together now, for good or ill,” she declared, like the queen she was. “If the world is to crumble away... then there is nothing else for it now than to meet it side by side or to burn together until it all ends anew.” 

 

“Aye,” he answered brokenly, so caught up in her he could scarcely breathe. “I’ll not leave you again.” 

 

She leaned closer again, her face resembling something that could be love-- the hopeless and foolish kind-- the kind that betrayed her every instinct, her every inclination. 

 

She took up his wrist, pulling his hand into her lap and unfolding it within both her own to brush her thumbs over her mark there, still warm, but no longer blazing like a forge as it had been for so long. “Sometimes, I still can’t believe it.” 

 

He laughed quietly, lips twitching. “Aye.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve not seen… well, I haven’t seen my mark upon you,” he ventured. 

 

He had thought idly about it almost everyday since the suspicion had first entered his head all those days ago at Dragonstone. What could it be? A wolf? He couldn’t begin to guess anything further. Unlike her, he had no mighty titles for a mark to signify. The sigil of the family he never truly belonged to, the depiction of his strange and silent companion-- it was the only thing he could possibly imagine.

 

She paused, eyes betraying the conflict within her. She seemed to come to a conclusion quickly enough, though, for she stood from her perch on the bed and began unfastening her dress. 

 

He felt something both fearful and wanting swoop in his belly. “Daenerys—“

 

“I cannot show you if I don’t remove this accursed thing,” she assured, pulling her arms from the sleeves and shimmying it over her hips and to the floor. 

 

Shucked of the severe angles of her gown, she looked unnaturally soft, like a wisp of cotton within the gray halo of light. The act was as bawdy as it was vulnerable-- a shedding of armor in more ways than one. 

 

Jon had been completely nude so few times in his life-- especially while living at Castle Black-- that he could probably recall every occasion if he had mind to. The act of disrobing meant exposure in his mind: to the elements, to the enemy, to any number of fatal threats. Watching her toss away what could only amount to pauldron and breastplate to such a woman meant far more than simple nakedness. 

 

Her shift was of an airy, diaphanous material, fastened by a girdle. The only proper clothes left to her were her padded trousers. It all left little to the imagination and Jon strained not to stare, his mouth suddenly watering at the splendid sight of her.

 

She came closer, pulling the collar of her shift over her shoulder, revealing a small, blue flower painted into her pale skin, just below her collar bone. It looked raw and red and agitated, much like her mark upon him. 

 

It was beautiful, he could not deny that, but it was also vexing. He didn’t understand why his mark would take the form it did upon her. He lifted a hand and brushed curious fingers over it. He took in a sharp breath, her flesh cold as ice under his touch, the petals rippled and ridged just as they would be in life. 

 

She pulled back, taking up her chair again, her pupils blown as she folded her shaking hands in her lap. 

 

They were both silent for a time, contemplative and quiescent under the bindings that were tightening their hold with every breath, drawing them closer together like a cords on a winch. He was trying to wrangle it all out... though his head spun in the aftermath of her touch. 

 

Her mark on his palm was...  _ relevant _ , echoing the grand deeds that ultimately told the world who she was-- the Breaker of Chains, liberator of the oppressed, the slayer of cruelty. 

 

“That day on the cliff,” he began slowly, looking over at her, small and pale and breathing as if she were trying to slow her heart. “You seemed so certain, and yet, as far as I know... a blue flower holds no significance to me.” He managed to tear his eyes away from her, contemplative. “I do know they grow in Winterfell, but…” 

 

She pulled her lips over her teeth, looking down at her hands for a moment before she stood from her chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Her nearness warmed him good as a brazier. She placed a hand over one of his scars. His chest hitched at the feel of it, the tenderness behind the gesture. 

 

“How did this happen?”

 

He blinked at her, dazed by her proximity as well as her question. “Mutiny,” he supplied roughly. 

 

She nodded. “You took a knife in the heart for your people.”

 

He flushed, the reminder of Davos’ impassioned endorsement humbling him properly. “Makes it sound like I had a choice.”

 

She seemed to have been wavering at the edge of her strength since he had touched her and now it was falling away completely. “I felt it, Jon,” she gasped, tears flowing freely. “I felt you leave this world before I even knew you and it was a torment I’ll never forget.” She brushed thoughtless fingers over her shift, where underneath his mark rested. “Your mark scarred over, then reappeared just a few days later. I did not know what to think of it until your Hand said what he did when we first met.”

 

His throat was closing up fast, his heart stuttering helplessly against his ribs. He was suddenly so desperate to reassure and comfort, so eager to banish that look in her eyes, that he felt made of lead. “Daenerys…”

 

The savage gleam in her eyes, the determination in her mouth as she spoke knocked him like a blow. “I almost knew that agony one more time, Jon, and I don’t aim to ever know it again until I am old and gray.”

 

He could tolerate it no longer. He pulled her down to him, kissing her so fiercely that all the pain she had endured, the torment that she had known for an anonymous soul a world away, may be spirited from her completely. His hands moved of their own accord, searing a promise he did not know he could keep into her skin.  _ Never again _ . 

 

+++ 

 

_ Everyone had their own thoughts on the origin of life. Shrewd, ivory tower types preached that life crawled flat-footed and lizard-brained from some turbid stew. Holy men sang of grander tales: blue-eyed giants and mighty fireballs.  _

 

_ No one could agree on the cradle of life, but its gallows was on the horizon.  _

 

_ “If I do not fight, there is no world for us,” she told him with a brave smile. She had brushed thoughtless fingers over her middle when she said it. The mark on his hand convulsed. She pretended that he somehow didn’t know, tried to keep the nascent life beneath her furs a secret for the both of them. The distraction of new life when death bordered them at every side was too cruel to endure. She did not mention it, and he did not ask. An acknowledgement was as good as damnation, in his mind.  _

 

_ She looked as lethal as ever, atop her hellhound beast, but he could not help but fixate on the delicate lines of the bones of her wrists as she yanked her gloves on, the thin webbing of vital veins underneath. He heard the scream of her son in his memory, smelled his black blood spilling onto glacial ice as he crashed with a mighty rumble.  _

 

_ He knew she was right, that she had woken dragons from stone and they were their best chance. That she had been branded by him and him by her and it was all too fateful and rimmed with holiness and prophecy for her to sit in a tower and hem and haw. That she was too full of fire and hellbroth for him to really think that anything short of her standing on the line with him with blood on her teeth was even close to possible.  _

 

_ But he was very much correct in thinking that if there were to be a world without her after all this was over, it would be a world unfit for him.  _

 

+++ 

 

He had been dreaming of her for years, had wanted her for longer, had  _ known _ her before she had even trod a booted foot upon the shore of his country. So he drank from her like a man who had clambered over miles and miles of tundra to get to her, a man who would do it again and again. And  _ Daenerys _ … she had trekked through battlefields and wastelands, death and ruin, so they may finally fall into each other, just at this moment, at the end of all days. 

 

As much as he had imagined how sweet and slow their first time may be-- as a child imagines flying upon the back of a dragon-- an inescapable and irrational hunger took hold as she carved little divots into his lip with her sharp, white teeth, as she raked blunt nails over his scalp and her hips ground down on him like a millstone. 

 

A moan escaped him, an involuntary sound that came from some unknown depth of him. His hands fisted in her delicate shift, threatening to tear the fabric asunder. She broke away with a grunt of impatience and leaned back to pluck at the knot of her girdle before it fell away and she pulled the offending cloth over her head. 

 

Her chest was heaving, her skin flushed and blotchy with desire, dark nippes peaked and perfect. He felt a thrill course through him-- witnessing the evidence of arousal that nearly outpaced his own. 

 

He dragged his hands upwards, gliding over her breasts, fingers pinching experimentally at the pebbled flesh, before he stroked a loving thumb over the little blue mark that had caused her so much anguish.

 

Something seemed to strike her good as a hammer upon an anvil at that. A small sound of desire floated from her mouth and landed like a sparked cinder in his heart.

 

He groaned loudly, surging up to bring her closer, closer than would ever be possible, pressing his fingers into the ridges of her spine, his palms feeble things, unable to gather nearly enough of the heat that lived within her. 

 

His muscles had been leaden, had been sore and stiff as boards. His extremities had felt as though they were still submerged in a glacial lake at the edge of the earth. His head  _ had _ been pounding and his mind as foggy as if he had spent a whole night in his cups. 

 

But something elemental was happening just then-- he was a cold unyielding ingot of steel laid in a forge, growing white hot and pliable, able to be forged into whatever shape she wished. And really, that is all he ever wanted. To become a weapon in her already considerable arsenal, a lethal blade at her side to carry with her until the end of his days.

 

The air between them shifted, rolled in on itself and grew thicker, heavier. Something needy and hungry and keen had risen within them both. A wound that required tending, a hunger that demanded sating. 

 

She crushed her mouth to his own, stealing the breath from him, as her hands shoved the furs keeping them separated aside. It was rough going, as she had to use one arm to balance her weight above him. He assisted her best he could, placing steadying palms to her hips. 

 

She fell back upon him with a little gasp, as if the distance away from him had been reaching the intolerable. The full length of her sealed against him was almost,  _ almost _ too much. Too hot, too close, too much of everything he ever dared to dream for. He anchored himself by threading his hands through her quicksilver hair, raising a trail of bruises over the line of her clavicle, the white column of her neck. She nearly sent him clean off the bed when, without any sort of hesitation or warning, she snaked her dainty hand down his chest and took hold of him with a firm, greedy hand-- his cock hot and hard for her despite the black spell of near-death he had woken up from not moments before. 

 

He slammed his eyes shut, pressing his face into her neck to stifle the groan that welled up from deep within him. Her moan as she slid her hand up his length had his hips twitching, his brain fogged by nothing but the need to be inside her, to surround himself with her body until the edges blurred into nothing. 

 

He brought his hands to her ass, digging his fingers in, letting out a growl of frustration that there should still be fabric there, a barrier keeping the feel of her skin from him. She fell to the side with a huff, hooking her thumbs into the band and shoving with an almost childish impatience. He had to laugh, offering to grab hold of the bottom hems and pull to make it easier on her. 

 

Freed of her encumbrance, she clambered atop him again, blue-green irises drawn thin around blown pupils, cheeks flushed and lips red and kiss-bruised. If she wasn’t so godsdamned beautiful, if his cock wasn’t taking up every last drop of blood he had left to him, he might have laughed at the sight of her hair-- braids half-pulled out, flyaways crowning her pale head like carded flax. But she was like some siren, some moon goddess that the wolves sang to within nightdark forests. 

 

_ Fitting _ , he thought. 

 

There was a slowing in their frantic pace, both of them properly bare, properly vulnerable. She shuddered, breathing out a great sigh before bringing her forehead to his own. They stayed there for a moment, still and restive all at once, letting their breaths mingle. 

 

“Jon.” 

 

It wasn’t the first time she had said his name, short and familiar like an endearment, but it was the only time it really mattered. 

 

There was no turning back now. It was a journey as fraught as it was simple. The echoes of themselves beckoned them on, but there was danger in going there-- a danger that could burn them up proper. 

 

Her mouth was warm when she kissed him again, her tongue insistent against his own. His hands roved over the flesh of her her thighs, trying to take in the softness of her. He had only known her wrapped up in corners and angles, stiff collars and jackets meant to cast her shadow far and wide over the flagstones of a throne room and etch her regal silhouette at the doors of ancient castles. He could not quite believe what laid beneath-- downy skin spread over female muscle, blood simmering like broth. A dragonrider, a queen, a woman. 

 

She shifted above him and suddenly her cunt was pressed upon his cock, impossibly hot, impossibly slick. 

 

There was no more time, no more patience left within them. They had both waited for a lifetime or two. Waiting was an option no longer. 

 

He buried his face into her chest as the small crescents of her nails grazed lightly up his length, as her fingers took hold of him and centered him right where she wished. He helped her, angling his hips with a groan, and was inside her within a breathless little gasp.

 

The heat of her was searing, the feel of her as exquisite and as punishing as anything he had ever known or felt. He flowed his hands over the basket of her ribs, marvelling at how small she felt within his grasp, how perfect it all seemed. 

 

She was looking at him as if he was not quite human, under her starlight lashes and a sheet of powder-white hair, crimped like seaweed from her crown of braids. He didn’t know why she would look at  _ him  _ in such a way _.  _ Especially now, rumpled and very much un-queenly, stripped bare and beard-burned before him. He may have betrayed death, but Daenerys was the one who sat upon the calescent shoulders of monsters turned messiahs, who summoned both death and salvation with the language of dragons.

 

She fell into him, her teeth worrying at his jugular, her hips shifting forward and backward, adjusting to the feeling of…  _ this _ , whatever this was. Being a part of a flawless machine.

 

His hands were restless, questing all of her unknown parts, painting her with gooseflesh as he answered her motions in kind. He brought his feet flat to the rough-spun mattress, angling his knees to provide greater leverage, needing to be deeper, deeper. Wanting more and more. 

 

Her breaths were humid in his ear, little helpless gasps of pleasure that he was sure he would never forget in whatever time he had left. Sweat bloomed over them both, skin steaming in the chill of the sea air. 

 

He felt the ache all too soon, the heavy pull in his groin, the coiling of a spring low in his belly.  He brought her hot face to his own, kissed her again and again, slow, searching, and thorough. He pushed a thumb through the wiry thatch of hair where they were joined, parting and pressing to where she was split wide and wanton, wrapped tight around his cock. He groaned hungrily and moved his thumb upwards, finding her clit. 

 

She gasped, keened, evidently already wobbling on that blind edge. Her fingers carved grooves into his scalp and she shook apart around him, tearing her mouth away with a shout, her breath not enough to fill her lungs. 

 

He followed, hopeless, almost at the exact same moment, washed away in the tide of her cries, her liquid heat, her clenching limbs. He held on tight, anchoring himself to her amid the tumult as he twitched and grunted and spilled into her without a thought. 

 

Later, they would lay boneless and dozy within the sweat-stained furs for hours. Later, they would speak in muted tones about the future, about the past, about anything at all. Later, they would wipe away sea-salt tears and kiss lazily under the dying glow of the lantern. Later, they may even laugh quietly like young lovers under a hay loft, hiding from their disapproving parents as her ship ferried them to an unknown fortune. 

 

But for now they crumpled into each other like ashes in a cooling bed of fire, their hearts retreating back into their chest

 

+++ 

 

_ She had told him she couldn’t have children, once. _

 

_ She had confessed it calmly, though she would not look at him, as she pondered the will of a god that would bind him to such a woman. As if fecundity were the measure of a woman and he deserved more than a reposed goddess. _

 

_ She thought herself unlovable in other ways, too. She was cloistered and cantankerous, broody, laden with spines and barbs. He would see that she would never think herself unworthy again-- not because these observations proved false, only that they grew dim and diffuse in the light that burned so brightly within her. _

 

_ He would see her unharmed, unmaimed, alive. She was the hook upon which everything hung. He had made her his wife and he had made her a mother despite her superstitions. _

 

_ She had weathered enough for the world. Had stood in the tide of war and strife and endured the sting of sea monsters and the scrape of shark’s teeth. She had paid her dues. He would see her plucked from the water and nestled in a green glade, hidden and sacred. The end of the world would make this mission a fancy of a lovestruck fool, but that was what he was, after all, and he would tend to her mortality with his own. _

 

+++

 

They had slept for hours before waking each other to fuck again. This time with some care, with some thoroughness, their bodies no longer goading them into animalism. Now, the windows of her little cabin were phosphorescent, bisected by crinkly, jeweled ocean. The lantern burned low, but the wick had been changed. The brazier was cracking with fresh coals. The table across the room had been set with a glass ewer of water and a pewter flagon of wine, along with a small silver tray laden with some assortment of food she could not identify from her vantage.

 

Someone had tended to them, and neither had stirred. She found this extraordinarily surprising for Jon. She had assumed that his years at the Wall, spent as a constant sentinel in hostile lands, would condition him to sleeping lightly. 

 

She did not quite know what to think about that. 

 

Her skin was sticky from cooled sweat, her hair ropey and matted. Missandei, doubtless, would have her work cut out for her as well as many questions burning in her big, brown eyes. 

 

She should rise from the rumple of furs, leave the little cocoon of warmth and maleness that enveloped her now, but she could not bring herself to be rid of him just yet. 

 

How fortunate, she thought, to be paired with such a mate. Lovely in almost every way save for his predilection for getting himself injured. She would have fallen in love with him regardless. And maybe that was the point. 

 

His mark in her shoulder had wound down, now a diffuse, pleasant chill within the swelter of their replete bodies and the weight of the wolf skins. She thought of her life outside that iron-clad door. Letters and meetings and demands. She nestled closer, selfish, and closed her eyes. 

 

“Mm,” she felt, rather than heard him begin in a sleepy rumble, her ear being pressed to the junction of his neck and shoulder. “Daenerys.”

 

She said nothing, still a bit addled, a bit unsure where to go from here. She watched as his eyes cracked open and roved over the moon-gilded shadowscape of the room. “Bloody hell, what time is it?”

 

He turned to look at her, brow creased in a vague concern. She knew what he was going to ask. She was a queen with things like wars and realms to tend to. She  _ must _ be getting back.

 

“I’m not leaving,” she said firmly before he could even open his mouth. 

 

He looked confused for a fraction before his lips curled everso, his eyes fond, the little chuff of air that left him was oddly knowing. 

 

She lifted her head, turning her face towards him, resting her chin on her knuckles. “I’m quite famished.” 

 

“Aye, as am I,” he said, looking around again. He squinted at the table where the plate and pitchers sat. “Is that…?”

 

She lifted herself up on her elbow with a little smile, his subtle horror at realizing that not only had someone been in to tend to them, but he had let this fact go unnoticed, amusing her. “Food, my lord.”

 

“Well, yes, I see that,” he answered as she scooted to the edge of the bed and swung her feet to the cold planks of the floor. “It’s just-- someone was _in_ _here_.” 

 

She barked a laugh. “How long have you been a king, Jon Snow?” she asked as she pulled her dressing gown from the clothes chest at the end of the bed.

 

He paused, pushing himself up onto his hands with a groan, face vaguely questioning. His hair was as twisted and wild as brambles, catching like coils of char-black thread in the light. “Not long, Your Grace.” 

 

“That explains it then,” she answered. “A monarch has little in the way of privacy.” 

 

He shook his head, eyes distressed, mouth downturned. “I should have woken if someone was in our room.”

 

His choice of pronoun made her feel a bit weak, a bit girlish, but she calmed herself. His concern did not lay in modesty and she was quietly relieved at this. She had assumed that her stoic Northern lord would wish to stow her away, hoard her like a precious stone. But no, his distress manifested in the fact that there had been someone else in the room-- while she reposed with him-- and he had not stirred in order to ensure if they were friend or foe. It was as endearing as it was ridiculous. Jon Snow, the protector, prone and naked under a heap of furs with nary a blade in sight and his legs weak as a lamb’s.

 

She stalled in knotting her robe, walking to where he sat and laid a hand on his shoulder. “There are no enemies upon this ship, Jon.” He looked unconvinced. “Besides, we were both…  _ exhausted _ ,” she said pointedly. “And you recovering from wounds and sickness besides. You are too hard on yourself, my lord.” 

 

He nodded stiffly after a moment, eyes softening. He barked a bitter laugh. “What could I have done anyway?” he asked. “Coughed at them?” 

 

She tried to suppress her laughter, knowing that if anyone did not do well with idleness and ineptitude, it would be Jon. And indeed, shortly after their second round of fucking, he had broken into a fit of coughs that nearly had her flying off to fetch the maester. But he had fought through it with a stubborn shake of his dark head and squeeze of fingers to her kneecap. 

 

“You will be just as fearsome as you ever were in just a few days, my lord,” she comforted. 

 

Something in his expression turned inward, rankled and restless under the tangle of furs. He nodded mutely, barely soothed. 

 

+++ 

 

_ Everything she did now was shaded and shaped by him and what he might think of it. What would he think of her new gown? What would he want for supper? What would he think if she alighted with the dawn and burned the world away so they could be left alone?  _

 

_ She wondered when that happened. When Jon Snow had pressed his thumb on her scales, had shoved the fulcrum of her yawing instincts to steady them, had pulled her so gently to calmer waters she hardly noticed.  _

 

_ He wanted to give her the world-- a borderless domain in which her and their children may tread with little fear. But she had had enough of the world. She wanted a border. A sunlit patch that contained him and her and a laughing babe with dandelion hair and nothing more.  _

 

+++

 

“Shall we see what our mysterious visitor has left for us?” she asked as brightly as she could. 

 

“I am right famished,” he muttered, flinging the furs off his legs and swinging them over the side of the bed. He sighed as his feet touched the planks and glanced up at her under a crinkled brow. He was giving her a small, sheepish grin. There was an odd look to him, apologetic and pleading all at once, something like humor underpinning it. It was  _ intimate,  _ she realized, certainly an expression she had never seen him wear before. 

 

She had known him for an age, it seemed, but she was still learning more and more every moment.

 

She had known her country for an age, too. Had heard tales of it since she was a girl. But she had never  _ learned _ it-- had never learned of the earthy, boreal smell of the Northern wild, of the raucous melody of rock cliffs and crashing surf of Dragonstone. And Jon was that-- the home she had always known but never studied. 

 

He lifted an arm the same moment as she stepped forward, bending at the knees to notch her shoulder under him. He was warm and heavy and languid. He smelled of soot and salt. She straightened, supporting him best she could. Jon Snow was not a large man, his frame lithe and light like a skiff, bounded by corded muscle. His body was...  _ efficient _ \-- well-kempt and beautiful. All lines and planes painted with light and shadow like the tops of python dunes, cast in the white pallor from the disc of the moon that floated alongside their little ship. 

 

In truth, as they shuffled along, her lover did not need much help, underestimating himself as he so often did. She was not sure if she would ever understand how he could continually think so little of himself and his strength, while stubbornly stepping into the fray at any chance. 

 

They walked to the sideboard by the door first, where a pile of fresh Night’s Watch garb had been left by Tormund before they had shoved off. She helped him dress as best she could, being unfamiliar with male raiment. She ended up acting mainly as a balancing post. This suited her just fine, as she could take in the splendid view of him more easily that way. He donned the thin undertunic and the ratty gambeson, as well as the trousers, leaving the boiled hauberk, sable cloak, boots, and gloves behind as they made their way to the table.

 

He sank into a chair with a huff, giving her a grateful look as she sat down opposite him. She took up the flagon of water and poured both of them a horn. Wine could wait.

 

They spoke seldom as they tucked in-- wrinkled, salted olives and tangy pickled fish. Hard little biscuits that turned to something of a paste between her teeth. There  _ was _ the luxury of some dark grapes, though they were on the brink of turning. 

 

Jon had not been exaggerating about the state of his hunger. He dug in with gusto, his manners slipping back into that of a mess hall at a wall of ice, far from the judgements of finer folk. She bit her lip, trying to contain her mirth, not wishing to embarrass him or distract him from his much needed meal. 

 

She continued with her own more sedate banquet until she felt his eyes on her. She looked up to see his mouth up-ticked, dark eyes sparkling. 

 

“No stranger to camp rations, my queen?” he asked. 

 

She smiled ruefully, picking an olive pit delicately from her mouth. Jon’s eyes tracked her hand as she dropped it with a little _ ‘chink’  _ on her pewter plate. “No, I’m afraid not, my lord.” 

 

“Jon,” he husked, “Jon works just fine.”

 

She bit the tip of her tongue, a dark thread in his voice making her weak. 

 

“Jon,” she repeated and he smiled, tender and disbelieving. Still. Still he doubted his worth, his place in her life. She squared her shoulders, her resolve hardening. 

 

“Though, I do not mean ‘my lord’ in its formal usage,” she confessed quietly. 

 

He was very still, his face hardening under the weight of his shock. There was only one alternative for the formal usage of such a title, and he knew what it was just as well as she. 

 

She shifted forward, oddly calm despite the weight of what she had just offered up between them. “What else is there for it?” 

 

On the surface, it was a foolish question. There were a plethora of tidings that should keep them apart. Delicacies of political maneuvers, a horde of undead things marching upon the living world, a despot sitting on her family’s throne. But what did all that matter now? Jon had been the only one to show her her place in the world and it wasn’t anywhere he was not.

 

His mouth quirked up, his eyes softening in the jumping half-light of the lantern, the eerie, autumnal glow of the brazier. “Is this a proposal, my lady?”

 

She said nothing, his choice of endearment all she really needed to hear. She simply leaned back in her chair and popped an overripe grape between her teeth. 

 

“Still,” he continued, regarding her as if unsure she was a real person, or some fever vision sent to torment him. “If you are to be my wife, Jon is a fine of an endearment as any.” 

 

+++

 

_ He remembered blue flowers.  _

 

_ They grew under glass next to a hot spring in Winterfell, vine-like and creeping up the panes. They were deceptively delicate, he remembered, exactly like her.  _

 

_ He remembered Sansa sucking a thorn-pricked thumb one idle day when the summer snow was too thick for training and the castle too stuffy for playing. He remembered keeping watch, sometime later, so Arya could snatch a boning knife from the fat old scullion and hack away at the stems so that she could bring a bundle to father, petals bruised and beautiful from her graceless handling. He remembered that Ned Stark had smiled a sad sort of smile, a smile of memory, and visited the crypts soon after.  _

 

_ He did not remember that they had been Lyanna Stark’s favorite, that a thorny crown of them had been laid in her lap by the wrong man and some time later, with a country torn asunder and blood on every blade, a black eyed babe had been born in a red-bricked tower.  _

 

_ To him, the winter rose had been nothing more than a pretty flower. A trinket to give to a lady, if he had been permitted to give trinkets to ladies. To Ned Stark, the flower was a mourning song. To Daenerys Targaryen, it was a gift and a burden, a trial and a triumph. A scar that had been earned in a queer manner. _

 

_ For Jon Snow, it was all these things, but larger. More cumbersome. A mark of his unknown past, painted upon his unknown future.  _

 

+++

 

“I wonder why your mark should find me, if I cannot bare your children.” 

 

The words seemed agonizing, plucked from her like a bad cough. She tried to look impassive as she formed the words, a confident observation as opposed to the plea it really was. 

 

She knew it was foolish to doubt, even a little. Only death could tear them apart, and even then, death had failed thrice over.

 

He was silent for a very long while. So long, Dany felt herself panicking a little. This was their last day. They would land upon Dragonstone in a manner of hours and the world would encroach upon them and nothing would be the same.

 

He turned his face toward her, the sooty shadows cast by the night-dark sea strange-angled, deepening the lines in his face. 

 

He shifted his chair closer, dragged his fingers over her cheek, ran furrows through her knotty hair, before bringing his palm to her chest, where he brought the warmth of her mark to his. “I love you. I’ve loved you before I even knew what it meant to love. We chose each other long ago.”

 

He had been silent so long, she realized then, because he had been turning and tempering the words within the forge of his vital heart. Had honed them to an edge so that they may find their mark and never be pulled loose. 

 

Her lungs were failing, her blood roaring. She felt like some precious creature, cradled and cared for by the only soul who knew how to do it properly. Words would not come, so she sought to tell him the same with her mouth, with her hands, with everything she had left to her. 

 

She would tell him tomorrow. And the next day, and the next. And every day after. How ever many that may be. 

 

+++ 

 

_ He was wolf slipping through the black trees, a flash of steel in the smoke of a battlefield. He was thorny and passionate and as dark as a raven’s wing. He kicked and clawed and spat in the mud with men who had never seen a king before. His calloused fingers rasped over the lines of maps like horse hair over catgut. He preferred ale over wine and water over ale. He loved his horses and his saddle. He was messy and his handwriting unkempt-- the permanent mark of a boy who had better things to do. He could singe with a look and heal just as well. He liked her laugh and loved her hair. He stood close to her in court, and brought her apart in their bed. He was always fiddling-- clenching his hands, adjusting his sword belt, fixing her cloak. He had died once, but Jon Snow didn’t believe in gods. _

 

+++ 

 

“I think it’s… strange.” 

 

He made a noise of understanding. “Aye,” he returned, “it is hard to think that… that all we’ve suffered, all  _ everyone _ has suffered--”

 

“It is not a subject to dwell upon,” she said softly, pressing a cool palm to his knuckles as he fastened his boiled hauberk. 

 

She blew out the lantern and it hissed away in a sudden tang of sulfur and gray tongue of smoke. 

 

She passed him a cane, twisted and polished and crowned with a snarling dragon’s head. “You have bruised ribs, Jon Snow,” she warned. 

 

He laughed, taking up the cane, feeling that it would be quite useless to point out that he had done little to aid the healing of his ribs in the three days they were caught up in one another. “Yes, Your Grace.”

 

She bent at the waist, squinting at her reflection in the moldy mirror. She yanked her high collar up a little further, a red bloom of teeth marks peeking from the hem. “Sometimes, though,” she began. “I wonder.”

 

He said nothing, but he knew that she could feel his eyes on her. Could hear the air in his lungs rattle. 

 

She straightened, turning back to him. He wondered when she gained the ability to strike the courage from him as easy as knocking slush from the boot. Her eyes were heather gray, weathered and wise. “Where do we go from here, Jon Snow?”

 

His breath hitched, his chest not large enough for all the things he wished to hold. “Surely I do not know,” he whispered. He found his eyes were restless, not able to take enough of her in, roving over the crown of her hair, the hill of her shoulder. “But, whatever we do, I know that we cannot do it alone.”

 

She looked down, taking his hand and turning it over, brushing a thumb over the mark that simmered under his skin. He did not know if he would ever get enough of that feeling-- an elemental force that dwelled within him and answered only to her. “I don’t know if I will ever allow you out of my sight again, my lord,” she said with a tearful voice, though the corner of her mouth tilted up, a secret gift of a smile, just for him. 

 

+++ 

 

_ Families were strange things. Odd clockworks with their own gears and mechanics that could never be fully understood by those who did not help to build them. Perhaps her and Jon could construct their own one day. Perhaps that is what they were doing now.  _

 

_ Awkward enough was meeting any ally’s brethren, much less the family of a king whose domain despised the name of her father-- and so her by judicious, Northern spite. The family of a king she was very much in love with, bound by strange magic and iconography, fucking most every idle moment they were allowed.  _

 

_ Families had a way of piercing through queenly artifice, stripping bare even the mightiest of monarchs of pride and dignity. Her usual wit and whiles would not be permitted here.  _

 

_ This was made painfully evident when confronted with Jon Snow’s imperious sisters. One tall and white and pale, one short and scrappy and darker. One with dawn-sky eyes and the others’ as black as a beetle. They could not be more different, but they both held the same things in their gazes-- a black wisdom of the world and a fearsome, bone-deep love for their brother.  _

 

_ Her love shifted through all this dauntless, like a green boy half his age, and that made her think. How old  _ was _ the King in the North? The title itself sounded ancient, a colloquial name for the winter squalls that truly ruled his land. But the man it belonged too seemed ageless-- impossibly worn and impossibly new. The world hung heavy in his eyes, but weightless in his vast heart.  _

 

_ She watched as he found a safe perch back into his home, so long away that two long lost siblings had been returned like the treasures they were. She watched as he swallowed up his dearly missed sisters in his ridiculous cloak and pressed cold, snowy kisses to their pale heads.  _

 

+++ 

 

It was not a triumphant homecoming. Tyrion stood stormy-eyed and severe at the foot of the causeway, his blonde mane swaying angrily in the wind. Jon watched as Tyrion’s clever eyes picked out the dragons from the soupy clouds above them before he shifted his withering glare to him, a pallid and paltry offering in exchange for what his queen had paid. 

 

Jon clenched his teeth, the mark on his hand twinging hard as the rag-tag company marched up the long, winding stair. 

 

Daenerys walked to his right, her fastidious, queenly mask firmly in place as her Hand pelted her with questions. Her answers were short and economical and she never once looked to him for rescue or back up. 

 

He found himself swaying, a bit off kilter as he leaned on his cane. She had anchored him for days aboard that boat, with her secret, quickdraw smiles and her fiery scent. Everything made sense then. He was a man and she was a woman and they were crazy about each other. Some unknown hand had laid the tinder and they had lit it with ease and had fanned it to a healthy roar in that dim, dank cabin. 

 

The world was crashing in on them now, and they’d have to sift through the rubble to find themselves again, but they’d do it, he had no doubt. 

 

This thought followed him like a benevolent ghost as he climbed up the winding stair, leaning on the cane that he did not really need. She had given it to him and that’s all that really mattered.

 

+++ 

 

_ She had been painted with a blue flower. Had heard an echo in her blood for years and years, through the red dust of wastelands and the sun-baked bricks of ancient cities a world away. Had sailed across a black sea to claim the seat of her homeland only to be claimed herself long before all that.  _

 

_ Cities had been sacked and chains struck asunder, banners heaped at her feet and the blood of multitudes painted on her hands. She had burned and burned, searching for the home that had been taken from her amid the rubble-- the ships that would carry her there, the armies that would deliver it to her. And now she was here in a drafty castle that smelled of soot and sex, the throne of her family a distant siren call, the man beside her, washed in a moonbeam, the only home she had ever known.    _

 

+++ 

 

Jon Snow the noble, the naive and foolish, declaring fealty to the wrong queen in full witness of gods and country. 

 

That’s what her men would say. What  _ his _ men would say. But a fierce whip of heat had blazed through his bones, sparking in his palm and flushing through the rest of him. It left him helpless, dazed and dizzy after being knocked by a wave and spun in the undertow. He was powerless to  stop it.

 

An unmarked and unclaimed Jon Snow would have done much the same. He was his father’s son and falsehood did not dwell peaceably within him. But the spirit in his blood imbued the words, drenched it in power and promise-- a hex, a blaring phosphene that seemed to strike Cersei Lannister square in the chest. 

 

_ Stand down? _ he thought, astounded. Stand down and let Daenerys march off without him? 

 

Cersei’s mean eyes looked between the both of them, too angry to even speak and he regarded her in kind, in her dark regalia and her silver crown upon her golden head. She was beautiful and imperious, much like Daenerys, but where Daenerys held the sun in her hands, Cersei grasped nothing but a flimsy imitation. A lantern filled with fireflies. 

 

They left King’s Landing that day with an understanding between disparate parties and after he had willingly and fearlessly brought it all tumbling down on their heads. 

 

He was glad to be rid of the place, but as they hoved their way through Blackwater Bay, he watched as the ochre walls of the Red Keep reached to the slate sky above. He thought of many things, but one in particular. One impossible fancy. 

 

He’d never been so far south before and he had never thought he would ever want to return, but Daenerys did not do well in the cold.

 

+++ 

 

_ She was a bolt of lightning, a swathe of moonbeam laid on nightdark mountains. She grew solid and inert when her guts were roiling within, a panther winching it’s muscles, enemies in her sights. She was diaphanous when with him, nothing left to guard her, her skin milky and faultless against the slate of a wolf’s fur. She liked her wine chilled, but her baths hot as broth. She was an ember boring through the snow, steaming and hissing in its wake as it got to the core of him. She spoke of her dreams, but never of her nightmares. She liked his hair and loved his laugh. She was meticulous and exact, ruthless and wanton, the wisdom of strange countries and queer magics in her eyes. She touched everything in his life— spiced perfume on the mantle of his cloak, a pilfered pie from his plate, a prodding of a place inside him he never thought was there. She had walked through pyres and tamed the untamable, but Daenerys Targaryen did not believe in gods.  _

 

+++ 

 

The Godswood was cold, but not as cold as it had been. Her breath furled before her like ephemeral ferns, the slurry of snowmelt and leaflitter slopped beneath her boots. People were gathered and silent under the red-rimmed bones of the heart tree, knotted up in cloak and coat, but all she could see was him, almost too beautiful to behold.

 

Jon Snow stood before a yawning, ancient face, his dark head crowned by snow dust like the Northern king he was and wasn’t. His arm was bound and a fresh cut gleamed pink and raw over his eye. She knew the lay of the land under his handsome gambeson and hauberk, a mottled sea of bruises she had navigated like a foolhardy pathfinder. 

 

She had her own frontier of healing hurts-- a burn on her ankle from the Night King’s icy claw, a dislocated shoulder from a fall, a ring of purple around her wrists, where her lover had yanked her from a demon’s grip with the strength of the dragon she knew he was. His mark in her flesh still sore and tender from the torment it had undergone.

 

He had fought through the throng with tooth and nail, and she had bellowed spells of hellfire to clear his way. He had been the one to pluck her from the snapping tempest this time, and they had held each other, gummy with blood and singed and shaking, while winter broke apart around them. 

 

They came out of it. Blackened and bloody and never quite the same, but they came out of it, and green grass was sprouting up in the fresh mud and infant flowers were peeking their heads through the thin shell of snow. A flicker of life resided within her.

 

She walked to where he stood waiting for her, and his eyes were brimming. 

 

+++ 

 

_ The world was good and green.  _

 

_ It had been seven years, and Missandei had not seen so much green since Naath.  _

 

_ There were still fields lain fallow, homes still cinder sentinels, castles still tumbledown rubble, but they were less now. Far less. And Missandei had helped build this verdant scape, had helped fashion this broken realm into what her king and queen had envisioned.  _

 

_ Her days were so full, with growing babes and the constant needs of a budding dominion, she didn’t notice it at first.  _

 

_ “Missandei,” Daenerys said curiously, one rare, idle evening as the queen plaited her hair. “What is this?”  _

 

_ Missandei felt a cool fingertip brush over the skin just below her ear.  _

 

_ “What is it, Your Grace?” _

 

_ Oddly, Daenerys had a smile hidden in her mouth when she pulled away. She bit her lip, going to find the silverglass. Missandei sat, still and confused on the settee.  _

 

_ “It’ll be hard to see…” her friend said as she returned, holding the silver glass to her neck. “Have a look.”  _

 

_ Missandei took the silver glass hesitantly between her palms, shifting and tilting it until she caught a flash, a shimmer on her skin. _

 

_ Silver lustered and black as obsidian, a very familiar sigil lay painted finely on her skin. A circle made of a serpent’s body, three sets of gaping dragons’ jaws consuming it in a perpetual circuit.  _

 

_ Daenerys had insisted that Grey Worm forge his own sigil, bare his own colors. She did not need him to bleed for her any longer. It was just like Grey Worm to never abandon his queen entirely. _

 

_ Missandei stared for a very long time. When she felt that she could move again, she looked back to Daenerys, whose eyes were overbright.  _

 

_ “We’ve done it,” her queen gasped.  _

 

_ Missandei half laughed, half sobbed, and clutched the silver glass to her chest.  _

 

+++ 

 

“And it pains me to say, I was wrong

Love is not a symptom of time

Time is just a symptom of love”

 

\-- “Time, As A Symptom” Joanna Newsom

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit. 
> 
> i definitely underestimated what part two was going to do to me. i thought i'd be able to just bang it out in a week and VOILA. 
> 
> well, here is the fruit of months of agony. enjoy my hand at semi-stream of consciousness. let me know what you think! it's why i do what i do!

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, a hearty thanks to the Tarts for their everlasting loveliness and support. <3 
> 
> Special shout out goes to [ashleyfanfic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ashleyfanfic/profile) for helping me work through some kinks. You're the best, love!
> 
> The absolutely stunning mood board I owe to a certain [Justwanderingneverlost](http://archiveofourown.org/users/justwanderingneverlost/profile). THANK YOU MY LOVE.
> 
> To those of you concerned for Oz: I'm trying to get ahead of the game a little bit. I'm elbow-deep in white walkers and dragon fire at the moment. This is a reprieve. Hopefully when Oz is back, it's with two chapters in the barrel. But rest assured that Oz is my big, hulking, ugly, emo baby and I will not let it die!
> 
> Chapter Two will be up later this week. Couldn't quite get it all done in time for one go. 
> 
> PLEASE let me know what you think!


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